Handheld mobile devices, such as cellular telephones and personal digital assistants (PDAs), are becoming increasingly powerful both in terms of processing power and the ability to provide access to data. The usefulness of these enhancements is often limited, however, by an inability of mobile devices to display data effectively due to the small size of the display, the limited bandwidth available for wirelessly delivering data, and the limited memory resources relative to laptop and desktop computers.
There are beginning to be some applications that are specifically designed for handheld mobile devices. Many such applications are based on application development platforms also specifically designed for mobile devices, such as Java 2 Platform Micro Edition (J2ME) and Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless (BREW). Some applications that are designed for retrieving data from a remote location to a handheld mobile device are browsers that correspond to conventional browser applications in that they enable users to enter uniform resource locators (URLs) to retrieve information from any Internet web site. Other applications enable data to be retrieved by launching a separate browser application in response, for example, to selecting a hyperlink in a user interface. In addition, specialized, limited functionality applications are available that provide a mechanism to access data from dedicated application service providers.